Seven idiots and a Monty: Lampooned on Mull

Eight men, one island, one tent, no shade, no females, no escape and enough alcohol to forever pollute a large duck pond.

It all started with a guys’ trip to the Isle of Mull. In the end, it proved, if anything, that Mullaluf is one of the least hospitable environments in the universe for young Glasweigians, that’s right, even the cold, void of space would have given us a warmer welcome.

We wandered blind onto an isolated rock, during a religious festival, surrounded by anglicised morons who class cricket as an extreme sport and racism as a hobby made better with the word ‘golly’.

Chapter one

Unlike most epic chronicles, I will not base my tale within a specific location or a time, nae, I will start it with a whom and that whom is Montserrat Monte Carlo Montgomery: an emissary from a lost race of twelve-legged desert insectoids. Having appeared on the horizon, armed with a musky suitcase of chicken balls, Monty was an asset to the group, ‘he came through for us’.

Maybe it was the gentle reminder that the mentally ill remember to breathe, or maybe it was the knowledge that he was free, living life the way he wanted to, like a moth to a flame or perhaps a flame to a moth, only time can tell. Notably, Monty disappeared up a nearby hill two days in a row in search of his spirit kin, instead he returned with a nasal sunburn blister he acquired during a conversation with a sheep.

Hard work or hardly working?

We settled in the camp after departing the ferry we had boarded at Oban. As you can see, we worked as a team to build the tent, although an avid eye may notice that I was trying to dig out a ‘tent-building reward beer’. Still, it could be worse. I could have been taking pictures.

The island views were beautiful, without doubt some of the most breath taking vistas I have ever seen, we were fortunate enough to be shipwrecked during the two days of Scottish Summer.

The views were only sullied by hordes of ‘Ollies’ (small English children of indiscernible gender with blonde Saxon bowl-cuts) running around shouting ‘Daddy, I want more’.

In the evening, during our much anticipated campfire, a man named Richard (or Dick) joined our troupe at eight in the evening with a glass of claret swishing in the palm of his right hand, his left hand left flamboyently limp in front of him. He said in an introverted English accent: ‘Excusssse me, ahem, lads, boys, ahem, it would be, ahem, dandy if you could keep the volume to a minimum, my wife is getting grotty’.

After a short consul, we deemed that this was an acceptable request. But upon crossing the park for more firewood we heard Dick giving having aggressive coitus with his ‘grotty’ wife in the tent he shared with his children. The best case scenario here was that Dick fed his kids Calpol until they boarded the sleepy express, otherwise, those kids will have a lot of memories to repressing. Let me stress, the best case scenario was that Dick drugged his kids unconscious in order to pork his chubby wife. We were being chastised by Gerry bloody McCann. Where’as the justice?

Upon our next meeting, Dick was being punched repeatedly by his small blonde-headed Malfoy child who screeched, ‘Daddy, I want fire, I want THAT fire.’ The albino demon then proceeded to cry and throw sticks, violently into the fire, loudly, annoyingly, and against Dick’s wishes, scattering ash and flame everywhere.

We quietened down the best eight relatively drunk young men can around a blazing camp fire at the height of summer. We were loud and we were dicks, nonetheless, being a dick is a relative measurement. A brief gaze into a crystal ball shows that Dick’s little white-washed gargoyle will also become a dick. A major dick chairman of the dick stock market, riding a sea of minor dicks into a major thoroughfare composed entirely of flaccid dicks where he will sit on a hairy testicle throne which slushes every time minidick passes wind. Gee, that child was a dick, a bigger dick than the eight of us put together in the grand scheme of things.

That’s a damn steep drop

After the campfire festivities died down, it emerged that Thomasz Meanster, a seven foot slab of muscle and curls, drank in excess of three quarters of a bottle of vodka with half and half measures. He quickly devolved from discussions of Chopin’s greatest symphonies into mutterings similar to, ‘I’m damn fucking drunk, get me more drink’ and ‘weerhrnahahahahehehehe’.

His brain functions frankly failed him, this was most obvious when he deemed it necessary to balance a flimsy bench at the height of the night’s darkness over a precarious abyss, a twenty foot drop padded with rock, sharpened wood, poison ivy and mud. Needless to say, the lightest of breezes sent him and his beloved bench scurrying down the hill into the night. He tumbled in silence, understandably confused as to why the world was spinning around him.

He hit the ground. And. He hit it hard.

In millennia to come, advanced forms of life will visit a ruined earth devoid of life to find Meanster’s gargantuan impression upon the ground. They will wrongly think that space giants fell from space and glassed the planet to ash as part of an invasion. Hopefully they will be incorrect…

Mull’s pub, where the lager is also used as a multipurpose toilet bleach

There was pub, which was more of a moonshine cave with exotic wall mould and mismatched glasses from the seventies. Nonetheless, the polite Polish waitresses brought us food. The presence of Polish waitresses on Mull also amused us.

I mean, is Krakow so bad that you have to bring food to the cast of Falwty Towers on a daily basis? It is that bad? Ah. Well that’s awkward. Shit. someone should do something about that I guess. I, ahem, hear Krakow is beautiful though. It isn’t? Well, the Polish flag is nice. Yeah. That’s the red and white one yeah?

Carlos Erra instagrammed the lovely expensive food, almost all of which was drizzled in some form of alcohol sauce, but I’m not going to show you the pictures. This is not that type of blog and you will just have to accept that.

Mull: Where the beautiful views are free… and everything else is inflated by forty pence more than mainland prices. We could have bought a calf from a nearby farmer with the money we spent on food.

Later that night, Dick imposed himself upon us yet again to discuss why he hates Germans and immigrants and most of all, German immigrants. Although his logic was impeccable, a war, seventy years ago is a great reason to hate Europe’s most powerful nation… Dick was outshone by an Australian simply named Clint Clinterson or something similar, who exclaimed to no one in particular that Fosters tastes like ‘fucking cats piss’. He made me tell him who Jeremy Beedle is. After ten minutes of me trying to explain, I realised that I had no idea in the slightest. I came to the conclusion that Beedle was a shadow of a memory of a concept that my brain initialised to protect me from Austrailians by confusing them. If true, as a defence mechanism it has been 100% successful. To this day, no Austrailians have ever killed me and that’s something to write home about.

Celtic won the cup on the Saturday. A small hunched over hag who was wearing a lawyer’s wig to hid her scabby witch skull, came into the room and demanded the score, then sneered upon hearing it. It was as if the sports event result was a waft of portly sea captain’s flatulence, break dancing in her nose and eyes whilst punching her pancreas with cancer.

Upon settling upon the waterfront, my comrade Billy Bob Thomson weighed the propriety of stealing a single crate of langoustines from the beach, this would have made up for the lack of fish he captured with his rod. As vengeance for his dishonest deliberations, a menacing seagull (Dale), sent from the darkest seaside quay of hell, circled us menacingly, taunting us, waiting to pick off any stragglers. We knew with horrifying certainty that this bird was an unnatural force in the universe. Like dogs barking before an earthquake we shivered with unease as Dale slowly paddled around us, not breaking eye contact for even the smallest of moments. A broken, dissonant children’s rhyme rode the air like a chilling winter breeze, giving us goose bumps. Upon leaving, our winged tormenter followed. Squawk, squawk, squawk, the gull mocked us for our cowardice, it’s calls sounding like gully laughter, contemptuous and squawky. The bastard. How dare he, we deemed not to meddle with supernatural sea life and fled faster.

On the minibus journey home, I tried to give Monty an anxiety attack because, if you haven’t already guessed, I’m an asshole: ‘Ah, dark clouds on the horizon, t’is a bad omen… Monty.’ He didn’t take the bait, but that may have been because he was blasting death metal through his ear phones to calm himself down.

Meanwhile our esteemed mathematician, Carlos Erra, spent half an hour cheating on an arithmetic puzzle in the Sun newspaper. He got two out of the three puzzles incorrect. This would be a really awkward outcome had he just achieved a degree in statistics just the other day… this much is for sure, a better suited name would be Carlos Error.

Two hours later, I was home, in Coatbridge. I missed her. There’s no pretension in Coatbridge, no Ollies. There are Tysons and Guccis. I can handle those little permatanned gits. Tracksuit colour dictates religion. Alloys on your car dictates wealth and the size of your dog dictates just how many drugs you deal. It’s a place where you’d more likely see a dog shit a pavement than see a child eat a vegetable. It’s home.

Epilogue

So, how was the trip you ask?

Well we had views like this…

Onsies like this…

Pranks like this…

Hair like this…

And campfires like this…

Well, why don’t you make your mind up? Long live Hot Pie!

None of the characters in this piece represent real people living or dead but are simply a figment of my memory of an event which both they and I were present at.